China in Africa: The Real Story

At last, a team of experienced researchers with extensive experience
on official development assistance (and foreign aid), and with deep
background on China, the OECD, and the Asian approach to aid and
cooperation more generally, has come up with an estimate of China's total annual official development
assistance (ODA) in 2013 of $7.1 billion. This fits well with the latest
glimpse into official figures, when a Chinese official let slip in
April 2013 that China's official aid was about $6.35 billion, and with my own estimates.

I highly recommend their paper: "Estimating China's Foreign Aid, 2001-2013
JICA-RI Working Paper No. 78, June 2014. Lead author Naohiro Kitano and
his colleague Yukinori Harada have done a superb job. The methodology
is carefully worked out and fully explicated.

One of
the gnarly questions in estimating Chinese aid is how to treat
subsidized (preferential) export credits, which like everything else out
of the Chinese policy banks, seem to be growing rapidly. Kitano and
Harada follow the method required by the OECD's Development Assistance
Committee (DAC), which states that export credits, no matter how
concessional, cannot be considered -- by definition -- official
development assistance for DAC members, as their main purpose is the
promotion of a country's exports. Of course they can be counted as
foreign aid, just a military aid is foreign aid. But to be comparable
with the OECD countries, neither of those two should be mixed up with
ODA.

From what I can see, the Chinese also follow this
recommendation. Though many in China do not understand the difference
between the two (this is also true for many in the OECD), the budget
lines that subsidize the two different loans (concessional foreign aid
loan, or "you hui dai kuan" and preferential export buyer's credits, or
"you hui mai fan xin dai") are also separate, and only one, concessional
foreign aid loan, is included in Chinese announcements of their foreign
aid.